Whisper or shout? the literary voice of Newcastle, New South Wales

In his novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Scottish writer Alasdair Gray challenges perceptions of Glasgow: ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city, said McAlpin. ‘Why do we never notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living there,’ said Thaw. ‘… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York …. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films … What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. … imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the outside world. It’s all we’ve given ourselves.’ (217) Gray suggests that in failing to offer their ‘magnificent city’ as more than ‘a music-hall and a few bad novels’, the people of Glasgow, particularly its creatives, are imaginatively disconnected from their place, and therefore deny their city not only to the wider world, but to themselves. Could the same observation be made of Newcastle, Australia’s largest industrial city?